With “President Pence” and “President Pelosi” trending on Twitter on Friday morning and some Democrats talking openly about starting impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, the White House dispatched Hogan Gidley, the deputy press secretary, to respond to a story from BuzzFeed News claiming that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. Rather than issuing a straightforward denial that his boss had tried to suborn perjury from his former personal lawyer and fixer, Gidley attacked Cohen, saying, “I am not going to give any credence or credibility to Michael Cohen, who is a convicted felon and an admitted liar.” Gidley also attacked BuzzFeed. “This is absolutely ludicrous that we are giving any kind of credence or credibility to a news outlet like BuzzFeed,” he said. “There is nothing in that piece that can be corroborated.”

In the past few years, BuzzFeed News has built up a formidable team of investigative journalists, it has won a number of awards, and what Gidley said was mostly hot air. But the survival of the Trump Presidency may depend on the accuracy of his final assertion. On Friday evening, the office of the special counsel Robert Mueller took the rare step of issuing a public statement to dispute the BuzzFeed News report. The statement, issued by a spokesman, Peter Carr, said, “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”

No further details were provided. In response, BuzzFeed also issued a statement, which said, “we are continuing to report and determine what the special counsel is disputing. We remain confident in the accuracy of our report.”

Until the matter is resolved, it is important not to succumb to wishful thinking. As of yet, other publications haven’t independently confirmed the story. Moreover, since the Justice Department seems very unlikely to approve an indictment of Trump while he is still in office, his fate will almost certainly be determined in the political arena, where fifty-three Republican senators, many of them cowed by the President’s Twitter feed, stand between the Democrats and a conviction in an impeachment trial.

Trump already faces all sorts of allegations, of course, from conspiring with the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign to trying to obstruct the Russia investigation and unlawfully enriching himself as President. So far, though, the one allegation that has made it as far as being detailed in formal documents filed by federal prosecutors is the allegation that, before the election, he, “Individual-1,” directed Cohen to make payoffs to women and that those payments broke campaign-finance laws. As serious as this charge is, few people in Washington think that it presents an existential threat to Trump by itself. The events in question took place before Trump became President. And campaign-finance law is a murky area, which few members of the public know much about. For Democrats in Congress, basing articles of impeachment on it would be a risky move.

The new allegation is different. It relates to events—Cohen’s testimony to the House and Senate Intelligence committees—that took place after Trump had already been in office for a number of months. Asking someone to give false testimony under oath is an act everybody understands. As William Barr, the President’s choice for Attorney General, acknowledged during his nomination hearing, earlier this week, it is clearly a crime. And, in the not-too-distant past, it has also helped provide the basis for articles of impeachment against two Presidents.

In 1974, the first article of impeachment that the House Judiciary Committee adopted against Richard Nixon (there were three over all) was that he obstructed justice by, among other things, “approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counselling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings.”

In 1998, when House Republicans impeached Bill Clinton, the charges once again included obstructing justice. In Article Three of the formal impeachment, they accused the President of encouraging Monica Lewinsky to file a false affidavit to federal investigators, allowing his attorney to make false and misleading statements to a federal judge, and attempting to tamper with the testimony of his personal secretary, Betty Currie.

The Mueller report, whenever it comes out, is likely to contain a lengthy section on whether Trump has obstructed justice. In all likelihood, the report will discuss controversial events, such as the firing of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and the repeated attacks Trump launched against Jeff Sessions, the former Attorney General. The key issue will be whether Trump went beyond his executive powers and acted “corruptly.” But asking someone to lie to Congress to save your skin is a much more straightforward offense, for which there is no conceivable justification in the Constitution. If Mueller were to provide convincing evidence that Trump committed this crime, it would be historic and crushing.

That raises again the credibility of the BuzzFeed News story, which the White House is so desperate to impugn. The two reporters who wrote the piece—Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold—have been covering the Trump Tower Moscow saga for a long time. In May, they published a groundbreaking article about how Cohen and Felix Sater, another Trump associate, pursued the Moscow project during and after the 2016 campaign. That story revealed many details that were subsequently supported by Cohen’s guilty plea in November, 2018, including how the project continued well into 2016 and how Cohen planned a trip to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to meet with senior Russian officials. (Ultimately, the trip was cancelled.)

In their latest story, Cormier and Leopold attribute the damning allegations to “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” When CNN interviewed Cormier on Friday, he said that the two sources had been investigating the Trump Tower Moscow deal before Mueller was even appointed. “It is our understanding that this is rock-solid information developed over the course of a long period of time, and that Michael was used . . . to confirm it,” Cormier said.

With key Democratic lawmakers already pledging to investigate the allegations, attention will focus on whom Cohen consulted with before he delivered his testimony to the House and Senate Intelligence committees in October, 2017. In its December, 2018, sentencing memorandum, Mueller’s office said that Cohen’s “false statements to Congress began in approximately late August 2017, when he submitted written statements about the Moscow Project” to the two committees. The sentencing memo also said that Cohen, in coöperating with federal investigators, had “described the circumstances of preparing and circulating his response to the congressional inquiries, while continuing to accept responsibility for the false statements contained in it.”

During the summer of 2017, Cohen had a different set of lawyers to the ones he has now. Presumably, he discussed with those attorneys what he would say to congressional investigators. But who else saw a draft of the testimony or discussed it with him?

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, an attorney for Don McGahn, who was the White House counsel at the time, said, “Don McGahn had no involvement with or knowledge of Michael Cohen’s testimony. Nor was he aware of anyone in the White House Counsel’s Office who did.”

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What about members of the Trump family? The BuzzFeed story says, “Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.” The story also quotes a spokesman for Ivanka, who said that she was “minimally involved” in the Moscow project.

On Friday, Donald, Jr., and his father both rubbished the story. “Here we go again... another CNN/Buzzfeed ‘bombshell’ with no evidence. The usual clickbait BS…,” Trump, Jr., tweeted. The President quoted a Fox News analyst who pointed out that Cohen had been convicted of perjury and fraud, and added, “Lying to reduce his jail time!” A bit later on Friday, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and media surrogate, issued a statement in which he said, “Any suggestion—from any source—that the President counseled Michael Cohen to lie is categorically false.” Giuliani also dismissed the accusation that Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress as “just more made-up lies born of Michael Cohen’s malice and desperation.” That is Trump’s last line of defense. If, as the BuzzFeed story suggests, there is third-party testimony or documentary evidence that corroborates the allegation of suborning perjury, it will have been breached.

This post has been updated to include a statement from the special counsel’s office provided to BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed’s response to that statement.

President Trump has threatened to keep the government shut down for days, weeks, months, or even years, urging Congress to give him $5.7 billion to build an extension of the wall along the southern border.